


Fresh and New

by Allekha



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Gen, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 04:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11501442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/pseuds/Allekha
Summary: Aeris and the world outside of Midgar.





	Fresh and New

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LookingForDroids](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/gifts).



What gets her first are the colors: the pure blue of the sky; the ever-present green of the grass, greener than her garden; the chocobos with their gleaming yellow plumage, bright but not garish; the spectrum of a sunset.

After Midgar, always so brown and grey, except for her garden, except for the Shinra logos everywhere, except for the signs in Wallmarket, the world almost hurts to look at. But Aeris looks. Looks at the plants she's never seen before and doesn't have names for. Looks at the distant blue-toned mountains. Looks at her companions, who seem brighter out here.

 

The world feels different outside of Midgar. Soft dirt that she hasn't had to work over and over again to get anything to grow in. Plants thick and cool under her feet when she kicks off her shoes at night. Wood, with its bark real and rough, not cut and smooth under layers and layers of varnish.

Her favorite might be the feeling of a mountain stream running over her hands. It's cold, in a refreshing way, and the water flows so quickly. The surface is somehow soft. It's not at all like touching the water from a stuttering faucet.

 

In Midgar, there was always noise. Construction. Shouting. Laughter. There were only a few places to escape it below the Plate.

But the wilderness can be almost too quiet when they run out of things to talk about. When it's not, birds really do sing all kinds of songs in the trees and long grasses. The monsters they fight make the strangest sounds as they attack and as they die.

Even in the cities, there are new noises for Aeris to hear: the sound of the waves, unending, in Junon and Costa Del Sol, accents she has never heard before.

 

The thing she might love most about the world beyond Midgar is the air. It's not stale and polluted, covered up with cheap, awful perfume where people can afford it. It feels good to have in her lungs, and everyone breathes more easily now.

It somehow smells of freshness, and in the mountains, of cold. The grass has a scent when the sun is out and beating down hot upon them that almost makes the heat worth it. Junon's air is not so clean, but not nearly as bad as Midgar's, and the ocean wind brings in its own scent.

  


Aeris has no complaints about her mother's cooking, and she does miss it, but every time they stop in a town and have real food instead of trail rations, she seems to find herself another new favorite.

In Junon it's seafood, freshly caught, but in Costa Del Sol it's coconut, especially in the ice cream she splits with Tifa. And mangoes, too, and bananas, and pineapple. She's never had fruit like this before: just picked, not out of a can or dried. She wishes she could send her mother some, and eat her pies made with these fresh, ripe fruits.


End file.
